From the Archaeological Survey of India’s annual Indian Archaeology – A Review, 1953–54 to 2013–14
Every Palaeolithic find and Pleistocene fossil reported in sixty years of the Survey’s annual review, read volume by volume and placed on the map where the gazetteers allow. Click a dot to read what the reports say about it.
From 1953–54 the Archaeological Survey of India published Indian Archaeology – A Review each year, a digest of the season’s explorations and excavations from every state. Claude, an AI model, read the scanned volumes and took out each report of a Palaeolithic find or a Pleistocene fossil: the place, the district, what was found, the setting, and who reported it.
Many sites turn up in several volumes. The map joins those reports into one place when the name and district match and the positions lie within 3 km of each other.
A place goes on the map in one of four ways: the report prints its latitude and longitude; another volume prints them; its village is the only one of that name in the district in a village gazetteer; or, where several villages share the name, it is the one nearest the other sites in the same report. A few well-known sites were placed by hand.
This page shows where each place is, which stages were found there and when it was first reported. The full dataset has every report behind it: the volume and page, what was found, the setting, any fossils and who reported them. It also lists the places that can’t be put on the map yet.
If you’d like it, email me at .